


Not the One You Wanted

by lulla_lunekjaer, smolqueernerds



Category: The Ever Afters Series - Shelby Bach
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Chase Turnleaf/Rory Landon (mentioned), Depression, Gen, Hallucinations, Kyle Zipes (mentioned), POV switch partway through, Post-Canon, Rapunzel (the Ever Afters) (mentioned), Rory Landon (mentioned) - Freeform, all a bit messy but born of intense love and grief, all formatting errors are solely the fault of smolqueernerds, honestly fairly dark so be careful, past Lena LaMarelle/Kyle Zipes, self hate, these are all out of order sorry, thoughts/mentions of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 06:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6504193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer, https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolqueernerds/pseuds/smolqueernerds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who is Lena, after all? The spare. The one who doesn't come along on the adventures because they can't drag her out of her workshop. Can't fight, can't even invent things that don't explode.<br/>The third wheel--she feels it so many times.</p><p>(A story of broken things at war's end.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not the One You Wanted

**Author's Note:**

> This work was born out of our desire for more acknowledgement of Triumvirate PTSD after the war, more displays of best friendship between Chase and Lena, and bc #LenaLaMarelleneedsrecognition2kforever.
> 
> A significant portion of this was written through violent texting back and forth.

Lena doesn't feel worthy to be the new Rapunzel sometimes.

Maybe she even thinks, in her worst moments, that she should have died instead of Rapunzel, that she's less needed, that everyone would be better off.

Maybe she thinks that the others wish she had died instead of Rapunzel.  
Even Chase.  
Even Rory.

She knows how much they cared for Rapunzel, her and her prophecies. Yes, they were confusing, but they had saved their lives so many times. Rapunzel and Rory were so close.

What's she, after all? The spare. The one who doesn't come along on the adventures because they can't drag her out of her workshop. Can't fight, can't even invent things that don't explode.  
The third wheel--she feels it so many times.

Today, Lena LaMarelle stands in her tower, the tower which is hers in name only, by Tale only, and hears whispers hissing from the cracks between the stones in the wall.

_Failure. Impostor. Stupid, useless child. You are not Rapunzel. You will never be Rapunzel. You do not belong here. Leave this place. Leave and do not return. You will not be missed, not by anyone._

Logically, rationally, scientifically, the voices can’t be real. They’re delusions, manifestations of subconscious turmoil. She knows this.  
But it doesn’t silence them.

It doesn’t keep their words from echoing in her ears in every Canon meeting: where she sits in a chair too big for her and her legs dangle without touching the ground, where they absentmindedly call her “Rapun---Lena” ( _because she’s not Rapunzel, she’s not and she never will be)_ , where the other Canon members ask her opinion with their politest faces on ( _because she’s a child, a stupid little child who’ll never grow up_ ) and she opens her mouth but nothing comes out. The others _chose_ this, after all.

It doesn’t keep their taunts from slithering through her skull when she sees Chase and Rory walking together through EAS, hands linked at their sides. She sees the way people look at them, with respect and awe and adoration. She sees the way they look at each other, like they are each the most important thing in the universe.

She knows that if she went down there, she would be looked at, but not in the same way. There might be respect in their gazes, perhaps even awe of a sort, humbled before what they do not understand. But admiration? No. Lena LaMarelle is nobody’s hero.

She knows that if she walked up to Chase and Rory, they might smile, but every time they look at her there is something behind their eyes she cannot place. Emotions are just neurochemical reactions, but they have never been her strong suit. Is it regret, pity, grief, resentment, guilt, hurt? Does it matter?

She knows, too, that romance is no more important than friendship for the societal interpersonal bonds of the individual. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t look at the glancing eyes of her two best friends and know that no one will ever look at her like she is the stars in the sky and the oxygen in the air.  
Maybe Kyle might have, one day, if this war had never happened. Once, the way Kyle looked at her over a table of half-finished inventions made her feel like a secret, a miracle, a galaxy shaped like a girl, colors swirling and stars burning under her skin.

But that was before, before Lena woke up every morning and remembered there are people, people she once saw every day and people she’d never encountered before in her life, people who were real living breathing human beings, who won’t get to wake up today or ever again. She saw some of them die. She knows some of them died because of her, and she’s scared she’ll never learn to live with that. Worse, she’s scared she will.

Kyle reminds her of a simpler time, a better time, a time she’ll never get back. He fell for a better, simpler version of her, the one that maybe he thinks she still is, the one that died and she’s not sure when. She told him a while ago that she just needed some time for herself and he nodded with a face she couldn’t read and she hasn’t spoken a word to him since. That’s the thing she used to love about Kyle Zipes - he gives you what you say you want.

 _Impostor, impostor, impostor_ , the voices chant in a spiteful thrumming rhythm that comes from above and below and all around, and Lena swallows hard. (They are not real, but that does not mean that they are not right.)

Lena walks in circles, pacing the tower’s inside, counting her steps. She hums. She bites her fingernails, or tries to before remembering that she doesn’t have fingernails anymore as her teeth clink painfully on golden fingertips.

She checks her watch before remembering that she left it in her room. There are no clocks in the tower, and she doesn’t want to leave. There are people outside.

She sits cross-legged in the very center of the floor and closes her eyes and thinks of Rapunzel. She draws in deep breaths and remembers as hard as she can, sifting through years of memories until she can paint Rapunzel’s picture on the inside of her eyelids, until she can imagine that she’s standing right there smiling down at her with kind-wise-distracted dark eyes. She even adds in her faint herbal smell and the swishing of her skirts. Her braid is neat, indicating she’s in a more lucid mood, and her lips are parted slightly as though she’s about to offer some desperately needed advice that will make everything fall into place.

Lena holds this image in her mind for a moment. Then she dashes it away and focuses on another, her last view of Rapunzel; an outline of silver dust in the air moments before it blew away on the wind, a disintegrating corpse. Yet another person who died because of her. Only she died _for_ her and somehow that feels like even more Lena’s fault than every person she brought to their death with her malfunctioning, uncontrollable inventions.

She wonders about what magical properties her ashes might have had and then chastises herself because Rapunzel is not, was not an ingredient for her inventions. It’s too late now, anyway. She wonders what form the disintegrated molecules have taken, and what they settled into - if they were absorbed into the air, the land, the water all around; if she might have inhaled any, and a little part of Rapunzel’s spirit rests now at the bottom of her lungs and flows through her bloodstream; or if they drifted back to Rapunzel’s tower, trickling down through the cracks between the stones in the tower floor.

A sudden pinprick of pain flares in her heart, like a wasp sting. It’s surprising; most of her hurts these days are dull, throbbing aches. Never this abrupt, sharp pang. It’s almost pleasant, to have a feeling she can’t ignore, can’t push to the back of her mind.  
It sputters out within moments, though. She flashes back and forth between the images a few more times for good measure, trying to regain it. Rapunzel here. Rapunzel gone. Here. Gone. Here, gone and she focuses hard on the gone this time because _that’s the one that’s real. Do you understand, Lena? That is reality and dreams are not going to fix anything because she’s gone it’s all gone and it’s your fault_ \---

  
More than her heart, her thighs and lungs are aching. Lena opens her eyes and realizes that she’s gripping her thighs, hard. Carefully, she peels her fingers away, aches left in their wake that promise bruises the next morning. Her throat is suddenly raw, and she licks her lips, tasting salt. She didn’t realize how hard she was breathing.  
As she slowly rises to her feet, feeling the stiffness in her bones, there is a knock on the tower door.

Lena blinks twice, wondering if she’s experiencing an auditory hallucination. (That was one of the symptoms of stress she _hadn’t_ experienced yet.) No one but her has come to this tower since the first few days after Rapunzel’s death. But before she can open the door to check, it bangs open and Chase comes rushing in, kicking it shut behind him, because Chase has never seen knocking as anything but a purposeless formality.

His hair is matted and sticky with sweat, eyes bloodshot, chest heaving. Each of his labored breaths sounds loud and harsh as a gunshot to Lena, and she takes an involuntary step backwards away from the noise. It’s too much. Having him here is too much; she hasn’t been this close to him, to anyone, for weeks.

“Lena,” Chase rasps, reddened gaze focusing on her. The sleepless circles beneath his eyes are dark as bruises. “I have to talk to you.”

She takes another step away, and then another, but it’s not enough. “What’s happened? What do you need?” He’ll tell her and she’ll help him and he’ll go away, just like before, just like always.

“No, this isn’t --- this is about what _you_ need, okay, Lena? Everybody says to just give you some space and let you grieve naturally, that you’ve always been able to work your stuff out on your own time and we’ll just slow down your healing process or whatever, but that’s crap. You’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. None of us have. The whole point of a triumvirate, of _friends_ , is that you’re better together, and you’re not getting any better by hiding up here every day and shutting everything out. So I’m coming in and telling you that you have to deal with this!”

“ _Go away_!” Lena’s voice is high and shrill in her ears. “You’re not going to fix me! Nobody is because I’m not _fixable_ and if you can’t learn to live with that I don’t have to learn to live with anything!”

“Lena, calm down---”  
“DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!” Her yell only rings out briefly before it is swallowed by the stones in the walls. The glass panes in the window shiver. The soundproofing spell was established long ago, so that when Rapunzel was dragged up here during her fits, no one could hear her terrified screams. “JUST GO AWAY!”

“I’m not leaving until you remember that you have a life!” Chase yells back.

But that’s exactly what she’s been trying to forget, all these weeks; that time goes on, and with it, life. That summer will end and she’ll have to wake up in the mornings, put on a school uniform and relearn how to care. That won’t last long, though; some authority would realize that she’s unchanging, unaging, and she’ll be the one that has to leave every time instead of Rory. Lena will watch from the shadows as the only friends she ever thought she needed leave her, step by slow step as they graduate, go to college, get jobs, drink, vote, marry, have kids and die - everything she’ll never be able to do.

Even back when some part of her had hungered for immortality, she’d never dreamed of being frozen at fifteen, trapped between child and adult. Full cognitive capacity is reached in the early twenties; perhaps, if she’d had those extra years, she could have transformed into what the West Wind once promised her she would become - the greatest inventor of all time. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the war would have robbed her of this no matter her age.

Once a hundred years of extra time sounded like opportunity and freedom, not punishment and penance. Each of her days is one that should have been lived by the casualties of the war, could have been if they’d received a golden apple instead of her. What made her special, worthy enough to survive? Nothing that she hasn’t lost - or maybe nothing that she had in the first place.

“Stop pretending that you care,” Lena hisses, fury blooming beneath her breastbone. She blinks several times to hold back tears, then realizes that none are forthcoming anyway. “Just stop acting like you need me, or that I matter, or that I’m worth anything, because I’m not falling for it anymore.”

“Lena, what the hell is wrong with you?!” Chase is gripping his sword hilt so tightly his knuckles have gone white, like he’s resisting the urge to pull it out of its sheath and fight her. They’ve never argued before, not really, not like this.“You’re smarter than this. You’re better than some stupid spiral of self-hate!”

Lena’s heart is a tornado in her rib cage, threatening implosion. “This is who I am, Chase! Everybody’s told me otherwise because they just didn’t want to believe it, and it took me fifteen years and a war to see that they were lying. I’m a disaster.”

“Where’s your evidence?”

Lena thinks she’s misheard. “What did you say?”

He glares at her, righteous and aggravating and desperate. “You’re the one who insists on backing everything up with logic. Tell me why you’re such a disaster, give me reasons I can’t disprove, and I’ll leave you alone.”

She doesn’t believe him, but it doesn’t matter. “Fine. You want reasons? Fine.” Every last one of Lena’s most toxic thoughts, the ones she’s locked away for weeks, come spilling out of her mouth. "Rapunzel was always more useful anyway. I got poisoned, I couldn't even help you, I had to be saved. I made the wrong wish, I didn't bring enough dragon scales. I tried so hand, but I was tricked twice. My own inventions were hijacked and used against me--twice. I can't even get the thing I'm supposed to be good at to work, why would anyone keep me around."  
She doesn’t say it as a question. She doesn’t have enough hope left to question.

“I tried so hard to be useful. When I was poisoned, I tried, I snuck out to help you. All it did was get me sicker. Story of my life---the harder I try, the worse I do." Her anger and sorrow are tangling and melting together, but she can’t stop to sort out their confusion.

“Lena---” Chase starts, his voice cracking. She sees him falter, swallow hard, before pressing on. “Lena, please---”

"Everyone expects something from me!” Lena whirls around, fingers clicking as they curl into fists at her sides. “I'm supposed to be Rapunzel. I'm supposed to be a powerful sorceress. I'm supposed to be the world's greatest inventor---better than Madame Benne. Do you know what that feels like, the weight of all those expectations? Do you know what will happen if I can't figure out how to be all those things? If I never amount to anything more than a third wheel, a spare, a castoff, a failure? Everyone will look at me and think that _the wrong one got saved_ , and they'll be right. I don't deserve immortality. I don't even deserve to be alive."

Chase’s breathing is silent now. His eyes are still red, but the flush on his cheeks has paled, and his lips are not moving. He has no counterarguments to offer her.

A kind of calm settles over her; a thick, numb, peaceful haze blanketing her now that every poisonous word she’s hoarded has emerged into the light of day. She is spent, and her exhaustion is close to serenity. Her lips curl into the tiniest approximation of a smile as she takes one, two, three final steps backward and turns to look out the window. The courtyard is deserted, nothing but an expanse of grass directly underneath her vantage point.

The glass panes, she estimates, are three-quarters of an inch thick. Laughably easy to break, when you have solid metal fists. Then, all that would remain: one foot back, bent knees and raised hands, rock and lean - let yourself go. Easy as falling out of bed.  
She calls up the equation for velocity of a fallen object and takes a moment for a rough calculation of the probability of her death, should such a sharp descent occur.  
The odds are high. It would hurt, of course, but she finds she doesn’t care.

What an interesting phenomenon it would be, that moment of impact, tearing skin and splintering bone. Lena lifts her golden hands, thinks back to the moment she lost her fleshly ones: blades shearing through her forearms, blood soaking the ground beneath her, screams ripping themselves from her mouth.

She tries to remember the pain and finds that she cannot. In her mind it has faded, like nearly everything else, to a dull ache.  
Her memory used to be photographic. Perhaps it still is, but the pictures are black and white at best now. Most days, their ink is smudged and their edges torn.  
A philosopher (which was it? she used to know) once said that life is only what we remember. Maybe this isn’t life anymore. It all just feels like a bad dream.  
In dreams, you always wake up before you hit the ground. Almost always.

_Please, just let me wake up. Or let me fall asleep, forever, and never dream. Let me live or let me die, but don’t keep me here, in this space between. Give me heaven or hell, I don’t care but this purgatory is driving me insane. I am a hole in the skin of the universe; fill me up or sew me shut or bring Rapunzel back, the real one, in exchange for what’s left of me. Whichever way, the others can heal and move on and forget. I’m dying slowly, so slowly, and I can’t take it. Forgive me, I can’t. Don’t make me, please don’t make me. Please._

 

 

What happens? What happens next, for a girl and a boy, chewed up and spat out by fairytales, shaped and scarred by war and loss? What happens for a girl who hears voices and a boy who cannot yet sleep without a sword close at hand?

What happens is this:  
Chase Turnleaf, warrior and brother and lover and friend, sees Lena looking. He sees the cold, calculating gleam in her eyes, and moves around the room to stand next to her, to look out the window next to her. And because he has never spoken the language of Lena’s mind, but has taken years to learn the speech of her heart, he tells her a story.

He tells her the story of a girl who went back into danger so that her family would always be looked after. The story of a girl who was dying and still helped her friends however she could at the expense of her own health. He tells her the story of a girl who kept going when all was lost, who found a way when there was none, who did miracles with only what she had. He tells her the story of a girl who was tricked, who tried again, and was tricked again, but who tried again regardless. Of a girl who left her true love because her best friend needed her help. He tells her the story of a girl worth saving.  
Chase tells her the Tale of Lena LaMarelle, who has lost so much, but who has not and will never truly lose the parts of her that make her who she is.

Lena never moves as he speaks, gaze out the window, seemingly still staring at the ground. Chase's voice is calm, but his heart is beating hard, fluttering like his wings. The world is narrow now, narrowed down to this room, to this story, to this girl, the best friend he only now realizes he doesn't know how to live without, can't picture an existence with no Lena any more than one with no Rory.

Even after he stops, the tale at an end, his throat raw and his mouth tasting like salt, she keeps staring, for three long seconds.  
Those three seconds are heavy as the air before a storm. Chase realizes he's stopped breathing. His face turns red, but he doesn't start breathing again until she turns away from the window.

She is crying, hot tears spilling down her cheeks and smearing her glasses. He suddenly realizes he hasn't seen her cry for months. He realizes it doesn't even scare him now, because it's a sign, a sign that she's feeling again, that she's breathing.  
Her knees are shaking as she steps away from the window.

She takes an unsteady step, two, three, and he moves forward just in time for her to collapse into him.

He wraps his arms around her and lets her shake.

At first the tears are silent, but then she begins to gulp and gasp for air, and snot mixes with her tears and dribbles down her face onto Chase's shoulder and he welcomes it.  
These tears, hot and wet and noisy and messy, are the tears of the living. They are not tears of joy, but neither are they wholly tears of sadness. They are tears of starting to feel again. They are tears of letting yourself live.

Years later, she will ask about that day. What would you have done, she asks, if I had jumped?  
I would have caught you, he says.  
I'll always catch you, he says.  
And Rory too.


End file.
